On a side note, I’d like to mention that, as you backup regularly, it’s worth getting into the habit of going back to your backup folder and deleting the older ones. Plus, if you click on the link (referral link) and sign up, we both get an extra 5GB for free.īy having your backup separate from your original catalog location, and synchronized to to cloud, you’ll feel much safer and won’t be afraid of losing all your precious editing.
ADOBE LIGHTROOM CLOUD FREE
GDrive offers 15GB free when you sign up (you already have a Drive account if you use Gmail). You can see in the image above that I’ve created a folder called “Lightroom Backups” inside of Drive and all my backup goes there. Google Drive: Since I live in the Google environment (Gmail, Android, Google Docs, G+, etc.), I’ve just signed up for an extra 100GB with GDrive and I store all my backups there.I used to use it for my backups but I’ve recently switched since they are now one of the most expensive ones compared to what all other services offer.
ADOBE LIGHTROOM CLOUD FOR MAC
To do this, go to “Catalog Settings” (Edit > Catalog Settings for Windows or Lightroom > Catalog Settings for Mac OS).Īs you can see, this window shows you where your catalog is stored (I’ll talk about it further down) and the frequency of your backup. The first thing to do is allow Lightroom to backup your catalog regularly.
They are stored in a location you’ve specified and Lightroom just creates a database of previews so you could work on your photos in a non-destructive way. It is VERY IMPORTANT to understand that a catalog DOES NOT contain your images. Stop right there!Ī catalog is basically a database of your images, created by Lightroom, that contains all the changes you’ve applied to your photos, such as metadata, flags, stars, attributes, develop settings, etc… If you’ve spent hours tagging and editing your photos, all the edits and tags will be saved in the catalog. I – Backing up your Lightroom catalog:įirst question: what is a catalog (.lrcat files)? I’ve often seen people confuse a LR catalog with “the entire collection of images”. So let’s jump in and start by taking the easiest first step: backing up your Lightroom catalog with the provided tools inside the software. Don’t keep everything in one single location. In this post I will be focusing only about backing up Lightroom in the cloud (online) and I’ll assume you already do a good job of backing up your images on multiple HDDs. Don’t ignore it and do it now if you don’t have backups of your work. I’ll explain below how I do it and what services I use, but first, I’d really like to stress the importance of having an efficient backup plan. One of the questions I get asked a lot is “How do I back up all my images and my Lightroom catalog?”. Of course there are ways to recover the lost information, but these services often cost a lot of money and you are not guaranteed to recover everything. But these HDDs are not 100% fail-proof and within minutes, you could be losing all your stored images and data. Everything fits inside a tiny hard drive connected to your computer. The beauty of digital photography is that you don’t need a dedicated storage room to put away all your archives and film rolls. I’ve had 2 hard drives die on me in the past and a third one is acting a little weird lately. Hardware failure does happen, and not just to other people.